Following last week's raid on The Pirate Bay many sites appeared claiming to have brought the site back to life. While that was to be expected, the site that has gained the most traction is now deliberately lying to the press and faking user uploads to give the impression that leading uploaders support them.

The Pirate Bay was without doubt the most iconic BitTorrent site in history before it was abruptly shutdown last week following a raid on a Swedish datacenter.

Even today it seems strange talking about The Pirate Bay in the past tense. Many believe it’s simply a question of time before the site reappears but for others any amount of time is too long to wait.

Within days, many replicas of The Pirate Bay appeared online, each trying to recreate the look and feel of the old site. While some, such as the isoHunt.to domain oldpiratebay.org, made it clear that they’re a copy of the iconic site, others are flat-out lying by pretending to be the real deal.

The worst offender by far is ThePirateBay.cr. Thanks to several mainstream news outlets posting uninformed articles in the days following the raid, millions of people now believe that this site is the real deal. Admittedly, that’s not the site’s fault, but that traction is adding weight to their current campaign which involves impersonating Pirate Bay operators and lying to the media.

In an email sent to out to the mainstream press, ThePirateBay.cr identify themselves as “winstonbay”, a name that has been used by genuine Pirate Bay staff in the past. By carefully weaving some fact into their press release (thanks to Emil Protalinski for the copy), their aim is to mislead.

“Most of our cloud servers including load balancer are shut down except one in NZ. TPB is back and already running at thepiratebay.cr which used to be an official proxy previously,” the release reads.

Referencing an earlier article on TF in which we pointed out that .CR was redirecting to another domain charging users for access, the release again blends truth and lies.

“Redirection to .ee – scam site running from long time was due to technical fault while DNS propagation which was cached by server. Comments & normal user login (VIP users allowed access) are disabled currently due to excessive load.”

Enter your TPB VIP username and password here – at your peril

The fact the site brings up user registrations is interesting since their existence offers a straightforward test to determine whether a site is a clone of The Pirate Bay or not. Quite simply, clone sites do not have the millions of user accounts The Pirate Bay used to have, neither do they have associated user comments under torrents.

While ThePirateBay.cr tries to explain this away by saying accounts have been disabled due to server load, they also have another trick up their sleeve. New torrents being added to the site now show names of popular uploaders. However, as pointed out by ExtraTorrent.cc, these are not being uploaded by the people in question.

“None of the torrents are actually uploaded by ETTV of ExtraTorrent and we didn’t log in or sign up to that site,” ExtraTorrent told TF.

Fake user accounts on ThePirateBay.cr

“This is them making their own bot to grab our torrents but the funny thing is that they made accounts [in our names] and are fooling members that we are uploading there. They are trying to make it look more legit so users go there.”

Other user accounts recreated on the site include SaM and Juggs of ETRG, YIFY, EZTV, scene4all and BOZX, previously one of The Pirate Bay’s most popular uploaders.

While people might argue that having as many Pirate Bay’s as possible is a great thing, sites like this are problematic. There have been attempts to mislead right from the very start and the recent mails to the press just make matters worse. It’s now impossible to determine the nature of their intentions but the lies aren’t a good start.

Add to that the very real possibility that former TPB users (VIPs no less) might enter their usernames and passwords into this site and there’s a very real possibility of account hijacks should the original site come back online. If they use the same username and passwords elsewhere, things will go bad a lot sooner.